Arma II: Mod Tools, Expansion Pack Announced

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Military mega-shooter Arma II has some mod tools out for those people who want to turn it into celestial strip-chess, and you can get hold of them here. Rather more interesting news for the general gaming public, however, is the announcement of an expansion back, Operation Arrowhead. The standalone expansion pack will apparently be shown at GamesCom, and takes place when “a new flashpoint in the Green Sea region heats up and coalition forces led by the US Army are sent to Takistan to quickly restore peace and prevent further civilian casualties.” So plenty more of the same, it seems. We’ll bring you some more details on that when we get hold of them, or you can keep an eye on this thread on the official forums.

Mod tools are always a profoundly good thing, even for those of us too lazy to make our own content. There’s nothing like a motivated fan community churning out original content and fixing issues with the original game to extend the lifetime of a title.

Speak of laser tag I find that the younger you are when you play it the more points you get. I played a long time ago when I was 12 or so and the 4 year old playing with me topped the leader board because he has no moral problem with following me and others around shooting is in the chest over and over again without moving or attacking someone else :P I was like “go away!” and he was like “Uh, no?”

It’s like a percentage slider, right now they’ve got 99% of their time on making the expansion and 1% working on patch. Maybe once the expansion is totally done and released they’ll be able to focus more on patching them both, or maybe they’ll just start working on another expansion or ArmA 3 where you lead a Us lead task force of nations to bring peace to Parfour

@dom, for what its worth, though given its you and you will just turn what I say into an anti-ARMA rant in your odd mind: yes there was a new patch. Shame it didn’t fix anything and that the single player campaign, the reason I bought ARMA2, is still broken
But as always, don’t let facts get in the way of your response…

Yeah, I’ve had little to no technical problems with ArmA2 either, but I’ve been accused of lying, being a shill, or even being one of the developers. I’m probably just lucky, and have managed to sidestep the worst of the bugs.

The people who don’t like the game seem to REALLY not like it, and go out of their way to dismiss the people who do. Reminds me of the ‘Bioshock is the worst game ever made’ crowd.

I dunno about realism before feel…the helicopters in ARMA weren’t just arcadey, they were bizarre. But helicopters are very complicated things and it’s not like ARMA was a chopper sim.

Wouldn’t fully immersing your firearms in water be pretty bad for them? I’ve heard guns like AK-47s will still work and things like revolvers but I’m not sure an m-16 would be safe to fire. Maybe it was supposed to represent you dropping soaked equipment?

Yeah, pretty much any modern gun will fire fine when wet and will even fire underwater, albeit only once and with reduced range/accuracy.

As to ARMA2’s expansion, I am pretty astonished. Fair play to them to want to provide more content to users (as BI always have) but to do so at a cost and especially when so very many people still consider the main game to be unplayabley broken is pretty shocking. I mean maybe it will fix some of the issues with ARMA2 but if that is the case, why are they charging us? It’s just odd all round…

Unplayable? They’d be wrong. You know what’s unplayable? GTA4 PC. I paid $40 for that steaming load of garbage but Rockstar gets the pass and they will never patch a fucking thing because all they need to mint cash is the name GRAND THEFT AUTO. And here my favorite little tiny Czech studio gets ripped on by people who hardly even glance at the game for reasons that anyone who would read the press releases would see are wrong. The studio that made the UFO Aftershock games and a small fraction of the BI team are working on this project. It’s stand alone, but arma2 content will be in the game if you own arma2. Engine improvements will be patched over to arma2 as they’re made. I can’t fathom what there is to complain about.

So, to those saying that the game is completely unplayable, am I just imagining the many, many hours I’ve played quite happily, singleplayer or online? Or have I just hallucinated it all, along with the 30-odd people who regularly play on the same server as me?

No, wait – I get it! It’s the new Bioshock. Nobody could have really enjoyed that game, and all the positive reviews were just part of a massive corporate conspiracy… only in this case, it’s a massive small Czech milsim studio conspiracy, who have apparently bought out every magazine and website on the internet!

@dom
Using Bioshock as a part of your argument when debating whether a game is worthy of its praise/criticism is dicey to start with .
Bioshock was, as I maintained from the moment I installed it, a very, very poor game. Not the worst game ever, no, but a bloody awful one none the less. The insanity that surrounded the reviews of that game was just…well..insane. Most of the hype came from the console reviews so that should tell you at least most of the story (anyone whose reviewing bar is set by the dross that oozes onto 360 is clearly going to be a little out of whack when it comes to proper games.). But anyway, I hated it on launch and I have had nothing but amusement from watching the “BIOSHOCK IS THE NEW MESSIAH” crowd slowly either be drowned out or converted by the sensible people out there who, at BEST, consider it a weak FPS in a nice setting.
As to ARMA1/2 what there are 3 things you have to realise:
1 – With the best will in the world (speaking as a long time fan of BI), BI’s engine’s are, at best, very sloppy. There reach exceeds their grasp at every turn and while that can lead to some revolutionary ideas and game-play what it more often leads to is the fact that their games only run “well” (a purely subjective term) on a handful of systems. As I pointed out back when ARMA2 first launched, Domonic, my PC is at least TWICE as powerful as yours (and has actually been upgraded in the meantime) and yet, when running at LOWER details than you I get worse performance. Weight into that that I configure and build gaming PCs for a living and I am, if I say so myself, bloody good at it and already a few eyebrows will be a-twitching
2 – BI’s games can be a tough pill to swallow. They have a unique style that they pretty much nailed down during OFP and have never changed (a mistake in itself, but that’s a different discussion). Even for those of us who have played all the BI games, changing over to them and their control methods can be a little jarring so what you have to consider is that most people out there still believe games like Counter Strike to be a little hardcore, so the massively complex interface of ARMA2 can be bewildering. Now while that is a dig at the players who are just too lazy to learn harder control schemes (the reason my favourite game of all times, Tribes, died out), it is also a dig at BI. They really need to address the core mechanics of their games because, as I said above, they just have not changed since OFP and they were never that good to begin with. A tactical FPS sim *should* be more difficult to master, for sure, but they control mechanism should never be both a hindrance and a huge immersion breaker that brings your suspended disbelief crashing down around your ears.
3 – Most people, believe it or not, buy games for their single player content. I know I do. While I am fully aware that OFP and ARMA had a thriving online community I never once dipped my toe in it though I must have had many hundreds of hours of game-play from them. Taking that into account it is not hard to see why ARMA2 gets a good chunk of its stick. As a single-player game it is chronically sub-par thanks to utterly appalling AI (they are not 100% bad 100% of the time but they do break utterly at very regular intervals), missions that have just clearly never been (properly) beta tested and cannot be completed a good proportion of the time (and in a game without save, realising that your last 3 hours of hard nosing it to an objective to discover that it has failed to spawn/wandered off/got bored and shot itself) is more than a little vexing.

One thing I will stand up against is the claims to crashes. ARMA2 has never actually crashed on me (I thought it had but it turned out to be a bizarre hardware issue) and as far as I am concerned those experiencing said crashes just need to configure their PC correctly (oh, and stop using Windows 7).

You put a lot of effort into that wall of text, but I’m afraid I stopped reading at “Bioshock was, as I maintained from the moment I installed it, a very, very poor game. Not the worst game ever, no, but a bloody awful one none the less” because you are actually from Bizarro World, and everything you say is entirely contrary to the truth.

@Dom
Your choice. I would have liked to suggest that conceding the moral high-ground so easily and over such a simple thing as an opinion of a game is a little churlish but then you have never had it, have you, given your rhetoric consists entirely of stating your opinion (that ARMA2 is AWESOME!!) then sticking your fingers in your ears and ululating till you get a headache. The fact that you consider schoolyard insults to be a form of discourse really should have alerted me to how wasted my time would be in engaging you.

Oh well…shame really. I honestly thought we could have come to at least a ceasefire on this ARMA issue but when one side refuses to even enter into discussion it becomes apparent that battle is unavoidable unless one side walks away.

So, to those saying that the game is completely unplayable, am I just imagining the many, many hours I’ve played quite happily, singleplayer or online? Or have I just hallucinated it all, along with the 30-odd people who regularly play on the same server as me?

No, no, no…. you’re not hallucinating a damned thing. You and 30 other people are having a great time. It’d be just smashing if the game worked as well for everyone else.

ArmA 2 is bloody awful. Glitch #32819: There are four warfare buildings that are mentioned in the manual that aren’t implemented in the game. Glitch #18932: AI randomly changes stances in combat and runs back and forth. Glitch #8931: AI ignores hold fire orders. Glitch #12389: AI keeps resetting weapons in helicopters. Glitch #320: Half of the SO module missions are completely broken. Glitch #3892: …

They say it’s the publisher(s) forcing BIS to release the games early. Think about this for a minute though. ArmA 2 publishers are noname companies that mostly release puzzle games for grannies. BIS is a reasonably well-known studio. Could they really force BIS to do anything? Or did BIS just release a broken game because they know fanboys will blindly swallow anything even if it stings?

PS I played GTA 4 PC on release and it was one of the smoothest, most enjoyable gaming experiences ever. BioShock on the other hand was plain awful.

The only people who cry about Bioshock are people who don’t understand the legacy it carries on (if not the story) from System Shock 1 and 2, who played it like a straight-up FPS with PEWPEWPEW powers, and either chose to ignore the beauty and depth of that Art Deco city under the sea, because they’ve grown up being spoon-fed plot and enemies by Call of Duty-a-likes, or who couldn’t enjoy it because they had a sucky PC at the time, and therefore commenced “This came from the 360, all 360 games are shit” BAAWWWing.
ArmA 2 is broken for some people, yes. But OpFlash took a long time to get right, and it’s still on my PC today, several years after it approached looking like a finished game. The PC Gamer review of ArmA stated that people who buy these games are people who know that BI and the community will patch and patch and patch until things are perfect.
The people whining in this thread are those who bought this game expecting Modern Warfare: Realistic Mode.

tl;dr – Quit comparing Bioshock to ArmA II, and quit whining about either of them. Bioshock was a modern great (not an all-time great, something we’ll look back on in 10 years time perhaps, but a modern great), and if you give BI some time, they’ll do for ArmA II what they did to OpFlash and ArmA – sort it out, and make it a bloody brilliant game.

@KnightOfCydonia
Whatever you are smoking you either need to take a lot more of it or a lot less; I cannot decide. Bioshock is NOTHING to do with the great games that went before it. It is a derivative, boring, repetitive and ugly Serious Sam remake and nothing more. Staggering around some interesting looking though utterly unused corridors while vapid, clichéd pap is spewed out of tape recorders and pretending you are having some kind of insightful experience is just self delusion at its highest.
You really think for one moment that the quality of the hardware I had at the time Bioshock launched had anything to do with my experience? I played it beyond its maximum details and my PC was still bored because it failed to use 1/5th of what the engine had to offer. It was ugly as all hell and had character movement straight from the 90’s. Simply giving you 10 different guns and “psionic powers” does not a good game make. It was just an appalling corridor shooter which was held afloat purely by hype and the pretence it had anything to do with System Shock.

Bioshock is nothing to do with System Shock 1 and 2? Really?
Ignoring the REALLY OBVIOUS DIRECT REFERENCE IN THE NAME, they share so many mechanics (The relationship between you and Atlas, for instance, is similar in many ways to the relationship between the hacker and SHODAN, for example, or the Plasmids’ similarity to SS/SS2’s implants).
And yes, Bioshock is a corridor shooter. I fail to see why that’s a bad thing.
Oh, and you’re really dismissing the tapes in Bioshock as vapid and cliched? Did you even hear the story of the White Rabbit, or earlier on, that of Ryan’s secretary?
Calling it ugly, too, is just… I mean, what, because it’s not as shiny as Crysis on Very High, or ArmA II when your computer can handle it, it’s instantly ugly? Game worlds can be beautiful and different and interesting without relying on multi-billion dollar engines, and Bioshock is a perfect example of this.
The fragility of your argument is demonstrated even further by the fact you have to resort to personal attacks, implying I’m on drugs.